The world’s largest transcritical CO2 refrigeration system has been installed and commissioned at a meat processing facility in California.
With a total cooling capacity of 4 MW (1,137 TR), it is the largest transcritical CO2 refrigeration system installed globally to date.
Previously, the world’s largest transcritical CO2 system was installed at a food processing plant in 2017 for Staay Food Group, a fruit a vegetables productions and supply company based in the Netherlands.
The 4 MW transcritical CO2 system was installed for California-based pork and meat supply company Yosemite Foods Inc.
The company supplies its products mainly to supermarkets and restaurants in Sacramento, the Bay Area, and Los Angeles.
The company recently relocated and expanded to the city of Stockton, where it opened a new 200,000 square foot (18,580 square meters) meat processing facility.
It is here where five transcritical CO2 refrigeration racks power the cooling needs for the facility’s quick chiller, process water chiller and cold/freezer rooms.
The system also employs the use of heat reclaim to produce process hot water.
In order to mitigate reductions in energy efficiency due to the plant being located in central California where ambient temperatures can be high, the system uses adiabatic condensers and parallel compression.
The transcritical CO2 system was manufactured and supplied by Johannesburg, South Africa-based OEM CRS.
CRS has been designing and manufacturing CO2 systems for commercial and industrial end users in South Africa as well as internationally, for more than 10 years.
Installation and commissioning was provided by CoolSys.
Michael Lau, from Yosemite Foods & Bryan Beitler from CoolSys are scheduled to present about the installation during ATMOsphere America 2019 (currently being held from June 17-19 in Atlanta, Georgia).
